Frequent Gene Amplification Predicts Poor Prognosis in Gastric Cancer

Gastric cancer is one of the most common malignancies worldwide. However, genetic alterations leading to this disease are largely unknown. Gene amplification is one of the most frequent genetic alterations, which is believed to play a major role in the development and progression of gastric cancer. In the present study, we identified three frequently amplified genes from 30 candidate genes using real-time quantitative PCR method, including ERBB4, C-MET and CD44, and further explored their association with clinicopathological characteristics and poor survival in a cohort of gastric cancers. Our data showed amplification of these genes was significantly associated with certain clinicopathological characteristics, particularly tumor differentiation and cancer-related death. More importantly, amplification of these genes was significantly related to worse survival, suggesting that these amplified genes may be significant predictors of poor prognosis and potential therapeutic targets in gastric cancer. Targeting these genes may thus provide new possibilities in the treatment of gastric cancer

Fully Discrete Multiscale Galerkin BEM

We analyze multiscale Galerkin methods for strongly elliptic boundary integral equations of order zero on closed surfaces in R³. Piecewise polynomial, discontinuous multiwavelet bases of any polynomial degree are constructed explicitly. We show that optimal convergence rates in the boundary energy norm and in certain negative norms can be achieved with "compressed" stiffness matrices containing O(N (log N)²) nonvanishing entries where N denotes the number of degrees of freedom on the boundary manifold. We analyze a quadrature scheme giving rise to fully discrete methods. We show that the fully discrete scheme preserves the asymptotic accuracy of the Galerkin scheme with exact integration and without compression. The overall computational complexity of our algorithm is O(N (log N) 4 ) kernel evaluations. The implications of the results for the numerical solution of elliptic boundary value problems in or exterior to bounded, three-dimensional domains are discussed